You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.

This aphoristic warning is associated with Dag Hammarskjöld’s private spiritual journal, published posthumously as *Markings* (*Vägmärken*). Hammarskjöld, who served as UN Secretary-General during the tense early Cold War years, used the notebook to record brief reflections on conscience, self-discipline, and moral integrity amid public responsibility. The imagery of “playing” with baser impulses and the concluding garden metaphor fit the journal’s recurring concern that ethical compromise is rarely containable: small permissions granted to vice or dishonesty spread and reshape the self. The remark reflects an inward, ascetic moral psychology rather than a public speech or diplomatic statement.

The passage argues that moral life is not safely compartmentalized. To “play” with one’s baser impulses, with lying, or with cruelty is to invite habituation: what begins as experimentation becomes identity (“wholly animal”), epistemic corruption (loss of a “right to truth”), and emotional numbing (loss of “sensitivity of mind”). Hammarskjöld’s logic is cumulative and psychological: repeated acts form dispositions, and dispositions form character. The final metaphor—tidying a garden—rejects the fantasy of controlled indulgence. If one truly wants an ordered inner life, one cannot deliberately set aside a tolerated corner for weeds; tolerated vices spread, eventually overtaking the whole.